Park Chan-kyong

Park Chan-kyong (Korean: 박찬경; b. 1965 in Seoul, South Korea) is a South Korean media artist, filmmaker, and arts critic. Park is known for his advocacy of the revival of minjung art in the 90s through both exhibition organizing and writing.^[1]: 15 With his first solo show in 1997, Park's career as a media artists working across photography, film, sculpture, and installation art took off, even as he continued to write criticism and curate shows. His multimedia works often deal with traumatic moments in Korean modern and contemporary history (e.g. the splitting of the Korean peninsula), the relevance of tradition in the modern age, and the shifting role of spiritual practices like shamanism in contemporary Korea.

After graduating from Seoul National University in 1988, Park was part of several collectives engaged with the legacy of minjung art, including the Art Criticism Research Group, Seongnam Project, and Art Space Pool. He curated exhibitions and collaborated on projects that concerned Korea's rapidly changing urban space, as well as wrote extensively for publications like Forum A (which he cofounded) on theoretical issues about contemporary Korean art. Park's artistic practice from the late 1990s continued to engage with core questions minjung artists had raised decades prior about the relationship between politics and art. He continued to explore the possibilities of utilizing documentary photography and archival material to examine the effects of Korea's rapid modernization with works like Sindoan (2008) and Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2014). Through his curation of Mediacity Seoul 2014, Park attempted to expand his thinking to consider how artists across Asia utilize similar techniques and imagery to engage with trauma, leading him to continue drawing on the phrase "Asian Gothic" (a term he coined in 2007) in his writing.

Park has exhibited extensively at home and abroad—sometimes together with his brother filmmaker Park Chan-wook under the moniker PARKing CHANce. Together they won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 for their film Night Fishing (2011). Both brothers were temporarily blacklisted by the South Korean Culture Ministry under president Park Geun-hye's administration. The end of the blacklist has allowed Park Chan-kyong to resume his major film projects. Park will also have his first solo show in the US at the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian at the end of 2023. Park still lives and works in Seoul.